Material handling vehicles are designed in a variety of configurations to perform a variety of tasks. These types of vehicles are commonly used in a warehouse or a factory to transport, store, and retrieve materials and finished goods.
Material handling vehicles are used to temporarily hold and transport products picked from shelves by an order picker to fill a customer order. The products are typically stored on shelves in a rack system in which a plurality of unit loads of many products are stored. Each unit load, generally, contains a single type of product, and a customer typically requires one or more boxes of product picked from many different unit loads. This requires the order picker to travel up and down one or more aisles of the rack system to pick products from many different locations in the rack system to fill the customer's order. Typically, each product picked by the operator is placed on a load platform on the vehicle.
In some applications, the load platform on the vehicle includes more than one predefined placement location for picked products. Each predefined placement location can be used for a specific customer, and the specific customer's picked goods are placed on the platform in the specific customer's predefined placement location.
The vehicle used in this type of application is commonly referred to as an order picker truck. The order picker truck can include a load platform, typically a set of forks, that are sized sufficiently long so two or more pallets can be placed on the forks or held by the forks generally side-by-side along the length of the forks. The order picker receives instructions that indicate what product to pick for a specific customer, and what pallet to place the product on, for the specific customer.
The instructions to the order picker are either written, e.g., on a pick sheet or on a display screen on the vehicle, or are audio, e.g., the operator can wear a hands-free headset controlled by a warehouse management system that can provide an audio instruction. Both of these forms of instruction require the order picker to remember what specific predefined placement location is for a specific customer.
With two or more predefined placement locations on the load platform, it is easy for the order picker to mistake one placement location for any of the others, or to forget which predefined placement location corresponds to the written or audio indication.
In an order picking application, the result of putting the product in the wrong placement location is twofold. The customer that did not order the product, but received it anyway, will most likely keep the product that they did not pay for. Then, the customer that did order the product, but did not get the product with their order, may be dissatisfied and request a fast turnaround on correctly completing the order. In some cases, future business with the customer may be affected.
Another option has been to put picked product for the same customer on all of the predefined placement locations on the load platform, i.e., one vehicle for one customer. This reduces the errors created by placing the product in the wrong placement location, but it also reduces productivity. The order picker spends more time traveling from pick location to pick location and this travel time is not productive.
What is needed is an indication system that solves the problems associated with providing instructions to an order picker.